Make your momma proud, boy or a manifesto on doing

My mother is proud of me -- at least I assume so. I've given her plenty of reasons to be: I don't do drugs; I don't drink (to excess); I went to a good school; I go to church on Sunday (under duress); I take care of my little brother; I call; I obey, but, I could be better.

I'm sure she'd agree, but I don't think she realizes how much better.

This is all to say, making my mother proud is relatively easy. I merely have to not be a total dick and even if I was I'd still be her boy.

But, I don't want making my mother proud the upper limit of my ambition. I want to make myself proud. You know, the guy who actually has to deal with all the baggage. The one who replays the fuck-ups, half-steps, could-have-beens over and over in his mind. He's a much more discerning audience.

So how do I go about appeasing that crowd? 

Well, first, I stop talking/thinking/planning/researching/attempting to do great things and I do them. I will fail. Let me repeat that: I will fail. But I keep doing until I stop failing. And then I edit until it's not merely a "non-failure", but something "good". Most people stop there, but I can't. That's when I take that "good" thing and make it "better". Then maybe the crowd will nod in approval and start the slow, stuttered applause that builds to a standing ovation, which leads to that riotous cheer: I'm proud of myself.

Thoughts on the city by the bay, vacationing, and the one that got away

This city, this way of life is everything I expected it to be.  That's a good thing.  Because it means that I feel comfortable.  There's no transition, no adaptation, no body temperature slowly adjusting to the cold water.  It's finding a sense of place that was missing before.  Feeling for the first time maybe ever that I belong right here, right now, and there's nothing that will get in that way.

I like the person I am on vacation.  I really, really like that guy.  I want to be that guy all the time.  I want that swagger, that confidence, that charisma, that ambition, that sense of adventure.  I want to be the guy who dons a fedora and scarf, chats it up with anyone willing to lend an ear, and really experiences life by his terms.

There's something about girls with cute faces, raspy voices, and plaid shirts that turn my insides into jelly and fill my mind with thoughts of long evenings sitting across from each other in glasses, face awash in the glow of a laptop screen sipping oolong.  Eyes meeting as we look up simultaneously, smiling.

The First

This is an attempt to write away my sadness.  Sadness brought on by a deep feeling of regret and self disappointment.  Sadness that appears rarely, silently.  I look away while sitting in a subway car, and when I look back he's there across from me. The me that should have been.  The me that was aborted by my own self-indulgences. 

Plainly speaking, I'm disappointed that it is September 2009 and I'm still working at a very un-fulfilling and meaningless job. A job that I, in my naiveté and inexperience, chose last year instead of others. A job which started well enough, but soon steadily declined as the realization that Architecture (my current industry) is not my passion. I do have complaints about the other, more managerial aspects of my employers, but those ultimately pale in comparison to the feeling that I am going nowhere.

This started as a post bemoaning the fact that I, in the simplest terms possible, am really unhappy with my job and current life situation.  And while the obvious solutions to both problems are to quit and relocate, the one voice of reason my life, my mother, constantly asserts that it is a terrible idea. Why introduce more potential troubles? It's true that what I need is a shock to my system to help begin life anew, but it has to be done in an intelligent way. Life is not a movie. There are no benefits to un-calculated risks. Quitting would only serve as a temporary fix to a bigger problem of my own issues with motivation and ambition.

But that's a post for a different time, the fire I had when I started writing has dissipated.  And now I'm left with myself. Slightly overweight. Early stages of baldness. Addicted to video games, with a tendency towards anti-socialism. And yet this morning I was thinking about how happy I was with who I am, because I'm a lump of clay in which I see endless potential.

It's late now, and my thoughts are scattered, but I would like to use this platform to speak about the things that come to my mind, on a daily basis. Introduce some positive regularity into my undisciplined life.

But first, an explanation of the title of this journal of emotional hygiene is 'Love Story Epilogue'.  All my past attempts at recording daily thoughts were collected under the title "This is my love story", my favorite line from a movie that resonated with my college self called Go. Go was the story of a Korean teenager living in Japan and his relationship with his abusive, boxer father, his school life, and eventually his relationship with a female classmate. He repeated the line several times throughout the film, to redirect the main storyline from whatever tangential path it had found itself on.

During my college years I wrote what was essential my love story.  It was a collection of one liners and non-sequiturs without a distinct goal besides recording my feelings at the time. Reading it now is an adventure back to a time where I experienced some of the greatest triumphs of my life, as well as the worst failures.

But now, I'm past that stage of random, incoherent mental diarrhea. (Which sounds more pejorative than I mean it to be.)

With this Love Story Epilogue I want to tell the story of a life that has taken a turn from the wistful dreams of my youth towards the sobered writings of a maturing man. This is as much an epilogue to my love story as a prologue to the as of yet untitled, story of my life.

I feel like I am in a transitionary period of my life, and thus a transitionary recording is appropriate.

_dnvrthms